


If they say I never loved you, you know they are a liar

by rosa_himmelblau



Series: The Roadhouse Blues [59]
Category: Wiseguy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-16 21:35:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29339145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosa_himmelblau/pseuds/rosa_himmelblau
Summary: Happily ever after.For the moment.
Series: The Roadhouse Blues [59]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1069713





	If they say I never loved you, you know they are a liar

When they were moving from place to place and Sonny felt it was time to move again, he never asked Vinnie. In fact, he usually didn't say anything at all, he just started packing, probably figuring Vinnie was smart enough to pick up on what was going on. And on the one or two occasions when Vinnie hadn't immediately started packing up his own stuff, Sonny had looked over at him and asked, "Don't think I'm going to buy you new clothes if you leave the ones you've got here," which was a really stupid threat, since Sonny still loved buying him clothes, and he'd be a lot more upset if he couldn't do it than Vinnie would be.

Of course, since they were traveling at the time and there was no question that they were going to settle down in Devil's Lake, Nevada, or Deming, New Mexico. That was completely understood: it wasn't if they were going to move on, it was when, and normally Sonny was the one who kept deciding on the when because Vinnie's inertia kept him from initiating motion, though once Sonny got him moving, Vinnie could keep moving. That was the other side of inertia.

But things were different now. Sonny had bought the apartment they were living in, that was one thing. Also, they had a view that included water, a lot of water—an entire ocean, in fact. Well, as much of the ocean as you could see before the horizon stopped you. They weren't actively hiding from anyone, so there wasn't any reason for moving around.

So when Sonny came into the bathroom while Vinnie was brushing his teeth and asked, "Is there anything here you really want to keep?" Vinnie didn't know what he was talking about.

He looked around the bathroom. "What, you mean like the shower curtain?"

"Not in the bathroom, in the apartment."

"Why, are we having a yard sale?" Toothpaste dribbled out of his mouth.

Sonny looked at him as though he was insane. Vinnie didn't know if it was because of his answer or the toothpaste. "No, we're getting out of here."

Vinnie spat into the sink, then looked out the bathroom window. The apartment itself was a very nice once, but that extra four hundred percent Sonny had paid for it, that was entirely for the view—which, while spectacular from both the living room and Sonny's bedroom, was pretty damn good from the bathroom, too. He wasn't going to get a better one, so where Sonny could possibly want to move to, Vinnie didn't know. So, the logical question: "Where are we going?"

Sonny wasn't looking at him. Vinnie looked at him in the mirror for a few minutes, but Sonny was looking at . . . the sink, maybe. It was hard to tell, he didn't seem to be looking at anything. Vinnie finished rinsing his mouth, wiped his face with his washcloth. Sonny took a deep breath, seemed on the verge of saying something, but he didn't; he was actually nervous. He had that uncomfortable _I don't want to tell you this, you're not going to like it_ attitude Vinnie very seldom saw. And when he did, it always touched him.

"Where are we going?" Vinnie asked again. He was considering shaving. Sonny had never complained about him not shaving before bed, and he would if it was a problem, so—maybe not.

Sonny quit looking at the sink and looked at Vinnie instead, but he still didn't say anything. He put his hand on Vinnie's shoulder and turned him around, pushed Vinnie against the wall and pressed up against him. Sonny didn't kiss him, but he didn't need to; what he was doing felt like a full-body kiss. 

"I've been thinking."

"It always scares me when you say that," Vinnie said, and Sonny laughed.

"No, you'll like this."

"It scares me even more when you say **that,** C'm'on, Sonny, it's the middle of the night, where do you wanna go?"

"I didn't mean right now." Sonny pushed harder against Vinnie. He had one hand on Vinnie's hip, his fingers sliding under the waistband of his shorts. He was staring into Vinnie's eyes, his eyes all full of sex. "Idiot."

"Well, I don't think you're gonna find a place with a better view," Vinnie said. "No matter how much money you throw at it."

"Who the fuck wants a view with an orange bridge in it, anyway? And the ocean's on the wrong side. I hate California."

"Where would we go?" Vinnie asked again.

"I don't know," Sonny said, and Vinnie knew he was lying, Sonny knew exactly where he had in mind, only he wasn't telling Vinnie yet. "First we'd have to figure out someplace we haven't been."

"We could go to Chicago now, if we wanted to," Vinnie said, trying to focus Sonny so maybe he'd get an answer.

"Fuck that, who wants to live in Chicago? Or Las Vegas?" though Vinnie hadn't mentioned Nevada. "For that matter we could go to Arizona, you could have tea with your stepfather every—"

"And you're calling me an idiot. Anyway, we were in Arizona, and I didn't notice it looked any different than Wyoming or Utah. I don't want to go back to moving around," Vinnie told him flatly, ignoring the way Sonny now had his hand inside his shorts, rubbing his fingers up and down Vinnie's hipbone.

"Who said anything about moving around? I was talking about finding a place and staying there—"

"I thought that's what we'd done here." Sonny was waiting for him to bat his hand away, but Vinnie wasn't going to do that. He knew Sonny's distraction games, and he wasn't going to play.

"Yeah, but we hate it here," Sonny said

"We do?" Vinnie asked. He was straddling a border between laughing and being turned on. Laughing won, for the moment. "So, where do we want to go?"

Sonny's gaze shifted away from Vinnie to the wall behind him. "Back east."

"What?"

"I'm going back to the East Coast," Sonny repeated very slowly. **I.** Singular pronoun. He still wasn't meeting Vinnie's eyes.

" **You're** going back east?" Vinnie asked, hitting the pronoun hard.

Sonny shrugged, finally looking at him again. His hand had stopped stroking Vinnie. "I. We. That's up to you. But I'm going back east."

"When you say 'back east,' you're not talking about that place we stayed in Maine, are you?"

Sonny laughed. "Yeah, that's exactly what I meant. I wanna go live in **Maine.** " The way he said it, you could have replaced the last word with _a tenament._

"It's too dangerous," Vinnie said, practically before Sonny had finished speaking.

"Is that a problem?" Sonny asked.

That should have been an odd question, but for some reason it didn't seem like one. "But why should we go back to the East Coast? We can go anyplace in the world we want to!"

"Is there someplace else you wanna go?" Sonny put his other hand against Vinnie's cheek, and the hand in his shorts was stroking down further, at the crease where his thigh met his groin.

"No, there's no place else I want to go—" He grabbed Sonny's wrist and pulled his hand out of his shorts, which made Sonny grin at him. "Sonny, if is this about Tracy—"

The grin vanished. "It's not about Tracy! It's about—" Sonny looked over his shoulder, out the window. "It's about having a goddamn orange bridge in my backyard! "And earthquakes! Who wants to live with earthquakes?"

There hadn't actually been an earthquake since they'd moved here, but earthquakes were a stereotypically California thing, so—

"Don't forget surfing," Vinnie added dryly. "Any day now, I might take up surfing."

Sonny ignored that. "And if I wanted to live on top of a mountain, we'd go to the Alps and find a real one—"

 _Mountain?_ Vinnie wondered, then, _oh, the hills. He hates these hills. At least it's back to 'we.'_

"This **is** San Francisco," Vinnie said. "Any day, one of us could wake up gay." Sonny ignored that, too. "You know, there are other parts of California—"

Sonny took his hand back, but he didn't put it back in Vinnie's shorts. Instead he put his hand on the back of Vinnie's head as though he was going to pull his face down to kiss him, though he didn't do that either. "You're the one who said we can live wherever we want. Is **this** where you want to live?"

Vinnie didn't have an answer that. When he'd been trying to decide what to do after Sonny ditched him in New York, the idea of coming back to San Francisco but not coming back to Sonny had been one he considered, but not very seriously.

Sonny was watching him, reading him. "Yeah, exactly—" Vinnie hadn't said anything but Sonny answering as though Vinnie had conceded a point was one of his strategies for winning an argument. "You hate it here too, you don't wanna live here—"

"I didn't say that!"

Sonny ignored that. "You just said we can live wherever we want. If that's true, we can go back to New York, because that's where I want to go."

That reasoning wasn't exactly unassailable, but Vinnie didn't argue about it. Sonny wanted to go to New York, and if he could use logic to get what he wanted, fine, but if logic was against him, well, someday somebody would find the spot by the turnpike where logic had been dumped in a shallow grave. Sonny would be going to New York.

And what the hell, Vinnie would be going with him. 

"We **could** just not have Tracy over for dinner," Vinnie said, and he barely got the words out before Sonny kissed him. Vinnie turned his head, laughing because it really was funny, Sonny's idea of how to win an argument. "—or I could just not be here—" Sonny was trying to hold his mouth steady so he could kiss him again, but between Vinnie talking and laughing and fighting him, he was having a hard time of it. "She's your niece, she's your family, and I doubt she'd be sorry to find I wasn't around—" Sonny got his tongue into Vinnie's mouth, and Vinnie let him kiss him for a while, he really liked this, this full-body kiss with some extra kissing on top. When he was pretty sure Sonny thought he'd shut him up for good, at least on this subject, he pulled away, as though he was just trying to get his breath. "I doubt Tracy would be sorry to find I wasn't around when she showed up—"

Now Sonny laughed, shaking Vinnie a little in frustration.

"—but moving all the way across the country just so we don't have to have dinner with her— Sonny, that's overkill."

"That's not—" Sonny started, but Vinnie grabbed him, kissed him.

"Sonny, we don't have to do anything. I'm OK, OK?"

"Yeah," Sonny said, but he didn't sound convinced.

Vinnie stayed in the bathroom while Sonny brushed his teeth, but he did what he could to hinder his progress by helping him get undressed at the same time, which Sonny didn't seem to find all that helpful, since he kept swearing and pushing Vinnie's hands away. And he got toothpaste all over himself, which he didn't find all that amusing. Vinnie did, though.

When they got in the bedroom and the lights were off and their clothes, all of their clothes, were off, Vinnie preempted Sonny's move by shoving him down on the bed and climbing on top of him.

"What the hell are you doing?" Sonny asked, trying to push him off, but so far he'd never been able to do that, which drove him a little crazy, which was not a bad thing at all. 

Surprisingly, amazingly, Sonny usually loved having Vinnie on top of him, holding him down. Who could ever have guessed that? Not Vinnie, that was for sure. He didn't think it was about wanting to be submissive, but more about the way Sonny loved what Vinnie could do. Sonny was competitive as hell, but he also seemed to get a kick out of Vinnie beating him at any game they played, and sex was no different. Vinnie's strength was Sonny's, the same way Vinnie's brains were Sonny's.

But that still didn't make Sonny predictable, and for whatever reason right now he was acting as though his dearest wish was to be canonized as one of the Church's virgin saints, which was crazy for a lot of reasons, not the least of was Sonny's undeniable interest. It was prodding at Vinnie very insistently.

Vinnie realized that Sonny was struggling, but he wasn't fighting him, he was inciting him, doing the same thing he did in the ring: deliberately pissing Vinnie off so he'd cut loose. A part of his brain found this very interesting, wanted to examine it more closely, but his body had other, more urgent concerns. Vinnie kissed Sonny, who certainly didn't mind that, then reached over and got the lube out of the drawer.

Sonny jerked it out of his hand and threw it across the room. He was looking at Vinnie, and Vinnie could see his face in the moonlight, that same calculating, gonna-fuck-your-brains-out look Vinnie had seen so many times before, as Sonny moved hard against him.

"Jesus Christ, Sonny, what the fuck are you doing—" but Sonny grabbed his head and kissed him again, long, and slow, and deadly and Vinnie stopped caring. "Yeah?" he gasped, when he could breathe again. "Then you better come up with something else or I'm gonna rip you up inside."

Sonny snorted back a laugh at that, but when Vinnie let him up, he slid down, running his hands down Vinnie's body. Sonny's strong hands on his body felt good, but they were a distraction, and Vinnie was single-minded. "Get your goddamn mouth down there or I'm not going to bother using anything at all."

Another laugh from Sonny—he was so fucking weird sometimes, but Vinnie didn't feel like taking time to analyze this new weirdness. Sonny's mouth was on his cock, and at the moment that was all he cared about.

It didn't take long for Vinnie to get wet; his body was doing its part, and after a few minutes he pushed Sonny over on his back, jerked his knees apart, and crawled between them.

He skimmed his hands lightly down Sonny's chest, down his stomach, stroked Sonny's cock once, hard, then grabbed his hips and pulled them up.

Penetrating him was easier than the first time—marginally, anyway. Or maybe it was because he was hotter . . . or more pissed off, which made him care less. The crazy pleasure on Sonny's face **was** making him hotter, no question. Vinnie's whole body—his whole world—seemed to be centered in his cock, with wild, forbidden pleasure radiating out. He wanted to close his eyes and just lose himself in that pleasure, but he couldn't look away from Sonny, flushed with sexual heat, desperate to get fucked. He'd known Sonny had loved it when he'd done it the first time, but he hadn't expected this—

He didn't know what to call it, didn't care, there was something about being wanted this badly that magnified everything he was feeling, made him want to turn Sonny inside out with the pleasure he was feeling. From the way Sonny was humping against him, he was doing a damn good job of it.

He let Sonny touch himself this time, and when Sonny was near the edge, Vinnie wrapped his hand around Sonny's, squeezing tighter, pulling harder, kept stroking a few minutes after Sonny had come, when the sensation was just about unbearable. The way Sonny moved sent shivers through Vinnie's body, and he lost it too, pounding into Sonny as though he could come out the other side.

Vinnie wanted a pizza. Sonny was asleep, and Vinnie was kind of sleepy, but mostly he wanted a pizza. He was thinking about getting up and calling for one, but he wanted to wait until he was sure Sonny wasn't going to wake up and start heckling him. Sonny wasn't laying half on top of him for a change, so it was possible for him to get out of bed without waking him up. In all the years Vinnie had been sexually active, there had only been two people who hadn't gotten all worked up just because he got hungry instead of sleepy after sex, those two people were Sonny and Roger, and they both made fun of him, so that could just be a gender difference. All in all, Vinnie preferred it to the sighs and looks he'd always gotten from women, who didn't think he was weird so much as insensitive.

So he lay there in the dark, thinking. It was amazing, how much it didn't hurt anymore to think, how he could even think about Frank. Frank had let him go so gentle, it about broke his heart, but Frank was fine. Vinnie thought about that very deliberately: Frank—was—fine. Vinnie took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He felt good.

They were going back to New York. Should someone need proof of Sonny's rampant insanity—well, this was the most recent example.

Vinnie knew perfectly well that this new life wasn't going to include anybody either of them had ever known before—it wasn't going to include much of anybody but each other, really, and that was all right. But lying in the dark, thinking about pizza, these weird scenarios kept playing out in Vinnie's head: of getting settled in a swanky Manhattan apartment, all the furniture bought, all the art hung on the walls, and picking up the phone and calling—who? Mooch, maybe. Yeah, inviting Mooch and Denise over for dinner. Vinnie had to put his pillow over his face to laugh about that because he could just picture it. _"Yeah, hey, Mooch, how ya doin'? How's Denise? Me? No, not dead after all, I've been living in San Francisco with Sonny Steelgrave—yeah, **that** Sonny Steelgrave, not dead either, you'd be surprised how many people you think are dead aren't, though I wouldn't hold out any hope for JFK. Or Elvis. Why'm I living with Sonny? Am I working for him? No, not working for him, living with him, as in cohabitation, you know, significant other, I boffed his brains loose just a little while ago, and we were just wondering if you an' Denise would like to come over for dinner—_

_Yeah, and then I'd have to tell Denise I'd given her husband a coronary. Even if I didn't tell them that me and Sonny are—lovers? Are we? Well, whatever, I still couldn't do it. Imagine Denise sitting down across a dinner table from Sonny. She'd probably sit there all night with her service revolver trained on him. Frank would be happier to share a meal with him._

_Nah, forget Mooch, forget any of the guys I grew up with, and not because of the whole not-really-dead thing. They live on the other side of a locked door, and if they ever open it up in the middle of the night, they don't talk about it either. Isn't that what Sonny's been telling me?_

_Anyway, even if Mooch was Mr. Enlightened, even if I could have had this conversation with him without it killing him, that doesn't take into account Sonny killing **me,** and not because I broke our cover—the supposedly-dead cover, that is. And here we are, back at the whole don't-talk-about-it thing._

Of course Vinnie understood that, the way he understood the way meat on Fridays still felt slightly wrong. If Sonny wouldn't acknowledge a kiss to Tracy, he wasn't going to seriously acknowledge **this** to anyone, ever. No-how, no-way. Vinnie understood that perfectly, he understood it in his bones. There was a time in his life he'd thought the same way, felt the same way. What was it Amber had said? _You can take the boy out of the neighborhood, but you can't take the neighborhood out of the boy._ Yeah, that was sure true. It was all still there, but it was jumbled up with a lot of other stuff now, a lot of other places. He had lived where Sonny lived, and even if he didn't live there anymore, he understood the validity of it. The weird thing was, it was Sonny who'd changed his thinking.

The logical assumption would be the change had started that first night, when they'd been a little drunk, and very silly, and for no reason Vinnie would ever understand, the tip-point had occurred. Sonny had looked at him for a long time, laughing at first, then not laughing, just looking. Then he'd shoved him against the door so hard it rattled, and he'd kissed him forever. That night had not been one of great sexual discovery, of portentous mysteries uncovered—it was more like Vinnie's first time with a girl—they'd barely gotten together before they both came. (That was an inaccurate analogy, of course; with Carol **he** had barely gotten her cherry before he came. She had just been left looking at him like someone watching the Rapture happen and wondering what the big deal was.)

The sex he'd had with Sonny during his time working for him had not enlightened him any. It was the time after that had changed him.

Loneliness had changed him, and time doing nothing but thinking. By the time he met Mel and Susan, whatever in him that would have been shocked was gone; what he saw instead of a possible Jerry Springer episode was a sad, but functioning, symbiotic relationship. What difference did it make that they were brother and sister? There was no abuse, no exploitation. If they weren't exactly happy together, they were a helluva lot better off than when they were apart; Vinnie had seen that for himself.

If he hadn't learned that you don't ask where love comes from, and you don't ask it to show its credentials before you let it in, he could never have slept with Susan—which would probably have been better anyway, but Frank had got it wrong, or at least he hadn't got all of it. It hadn't been just those long legs or those innocent, knowing eyes that had gotten Vinnie in trouble; it was the same thing that had had him sucking Roger off in Valdusta Ridge, the same thing that kept him coming back to Sonny—the same thing that had sent him flying this evening, that look on Sonny's face—

It was need. For some reason, that need to be loved, to be taken care of, to be **taken,** acted on him like vitamin E, or green M&M's. And more importantly, it validated his sense of who he was.

God, would Sonny hate that if he knew. Sonny never thought of himself as needing to be taken care of. Vinnie had had to yell at him to get him to use his oxygen when he'd had a bullet removed from his lungs, for God's sake. Sonny had been a terrible patient—

Maybe that was when he'd fallen for Sonny, and maybe why. The Chinese said something about saving someone's life meaning you're responsible for them forever. Well, maybe they were just describing how things were.

It was a culmination of all those things, and others—strangely, Calvin Hollis had played a part, that desperately needy, desperately sick little toad who'd tried to destroy his little corner of the world in a sad, sick search for pater-approval. Love. His mother, turning a blind eye to Rudy's whole life because that need was so strong. No one wants to be alone; no one wants to be unloved.

Vinnie was ninety-percent sure Sonny sound asleep, but before he had a chance to move, Sonny said abruptly, "Will you just get up and order your damned pizza?" So much for him being asleep. Or maybe he had been and he'd woke up again.

"I thought you were sleeping."

"I'm trying to, you're keeping me awake."

"I'm just laying here!"

"Thinking." Sonny yawned. "Just get up and order your pizza, will you?"

"My thoughts are keeping you awake?" Vinnie asked. "Who knew you were so sensitive? I wasn't even thinking about you. You want me to check under the mattress, make sure there's no pea under there?"

"Shut up and get your pizza," Sonny muttered.

"What was the deal with the lube, anyway?"

"Oh," Sonny said. "Yeah. That." Vinnie thought that was the only answer he was going to get, but then he said, "More friction." 

_Oh. Well, that makes sense._ "Yeah, I'll remember that."

"If you'll shut up'n go to sleep, I'll get you a pizza for breakfast," Sonny said. He was falling asleep again.

 _Vincenzo, if you're good, if you're quiet, I'll give you a cookie. That was Aunt Sophia, who'd bribe me with her homemade cookies. Always worked, too, though she was a pretty liberal judge as to what constituted either "quiet" or "good."_

Sonny elbowed him in the gut. "Stop thinking."

Vinnie laughed, moved closer to Sonny, wrapped his arms around him. "Yeah, sure." He still wasn't sleepy, but he was feeling good, and this wasn't the worst way in the world to spend some time, listening to Sonny breathe.

He'd finally told Sonny that he'd been thinking about opening a garage, though he hadn't told him where the idea had come from. He'd gotten it when he was in talking to Jill, just before Sonny'd caught him.

. . . Caught. Like he was doing something wrong. More like, he was doing something Sonny didn't understand, because he hadn't been planning on doing anything more with Jill than talking to her. Vinnie liked talking to women, he liked listening to them; they had a different perspective, one he couldn't get to on his own. No way could he explain that to Sonny; Sonny very seldom had any interest in a perspective outside his own.

"Go to sleep!" Sonny said again. "Jesus."

Vinnie laughed. How the hell did he do that, anyway? Yeah, he was tired enough, maybe. He could go to sleep.

When Vinnie woke up, he was alone. It was light out; Sonny hadn't gotten him up, so that meant no work-out, which was fine with Vinnie. He wondered if Sonny had gone to his office. It was after eight and Sonny was very strict about his office hours. Vinnie admired that discipline; he knew he'd need to follow the same pattern if was going do anything more than flush Rudy's money down the toilet, one bill at a time.

So he got up, got in the shower. He heard Sonny come into the bathroom, talking about some stock. Vinnie half-listened, made interested responses. It wasn't that he didn't understand what Sonny was talking about, it was that the whole commodities thing just bored the hell out of him. But he pretended to be interested, the way Sonny pretended to be interested when he talked about car engines.

He'd assumed Sonny had come in to use the toilet . . . which was true, sort of—he flushed it, using it to change the temperature of Vinnie's shower.

"What the fuck—!"

Sonny left the bathroom, laughing.

"What, no breakfast in bed?" Vinnie yelled after him.

"In your dreams, Terranova."

When he was dry, Vinnie pulled on his sweat pants and a T-shirt and went out to the living room. Sonny was sitting on the sofa, reading the newspaper. Vinnie could smell bacon and eggs, but when he got to the kitchen there was nothing.

He went back to the living room. "You didn't make me breakfast?"

"You were asleep," Sonny said. "Besides, you wanted pizza for breakfast. I don't make pizzas, I order 'em delivered by explosives experts, just like everybody else."

Vinnie laughed and sat down in the overstuffed chair, put his bare feet up on the coffee table. "So where's my pizza?"

"What do you think of Felson?" Sonny asked in that casual, just-making-idle-conversation tone that meant he didn't want Vinnie to think this was important.

"Felson?" Vinnie asked. It sounded familiar, but he couldn't place it.

"Felson Place." Sonny was hiding behind his newspaper, though nobody but Vinnie would be able to tell that.

No wonder it had sounded familiar—it was like asking if Vinnie wanted to live in the Dakota, only Felson Place was a neighborhood, and low-key in the way only the really, truly rich know how to be. "I think you have to be richer than God to live there, and even then your blood has to be so blue— Felson Place?" Vinnie asked, trying to wrap his mind around it. "Really?"

"Maybe. Why, where do you want to live?"

Vinnie thought of saying there was a park bench in Washington Square Park he'd always liked, but decided not to. "I never thought about living someplace that expensive," Vinnie told him. "Felson Place," he said. "Felson Place?"

"Yeah. What've you got against Felson Place?" You'd've thought Vinnie'd insulted his ancestral home.

"Hey, nothing, I think it's great. You got Patrice's money, why shouldn't you have his apartment, too?"

Sonny shook his head. "Why do I even ask you?"

"Who're you **gonna** ask?" Vinnie asked. "You got somebody else that's goin' to New York with you?"

"Skip it," Sonny said impatiently, throwing the paper across the room. "I can't do it this way anyway, I gotta see the view before I can decide."

Vinnie shrugged. "So, we go look. We check into a fancy hotel and we go apartment hunting. You gonna call for the pizza or what?"

"It's your pizza, you call," Sonny said. He picked up a section of the paper and tossed the it at him. "Here, here's the sports page."

Vinnie dropped the paper on the floor next to his chair. "You said you'd get me a pizza for breakfast. That means you call and you pay."

"You're spoiled," Sonny muttered, but he was picking up the phone when he said it.

"Uh-huh, yeah, I'm spoiled. I'm not making you take me out for the pizza, am I?"

"You're not dressed," Sonny pointed out, then started laughing. "She hung up," he said, pointing at the phone. "Probably thinks that was an obscene phone call."

"'You're not dressed'?" Vinnie asked. "That's your idea of an obscene phone call? That's really lame. Besides, I'm dressed."

"You don't have your shoes on," Sonny said. The girl at the pizza place must have answered again because Sonny walked away, talking into the phone.

They were going to live in New York, and though he hadn't said so, Sonny was going to have an office in the Empire State Building. He'd never own it, his name—either his real one or the one he'd been using all these years—would never be on it, since you couldn't exactly buy the Empire State Building without causing a helluva stir, assuming you could buy it at all. Vinnie didn't know. But he'd have an office there, that much Vinnie was sure of, even though he'd never mentioned it. He'd probably spend his lunch hours just staring off at the view. Sonny might very well love Vinnie more than he'd ever loved anyone else (though thank God he never said so), but that building was the real love of his life.

And they'd have an apartment, and while it might not be in Felson Place, it would be someplace lavish. And except for which side of the ocean the sun rose and set over, nothing was going to make their lives much different. Just being in Manhattan would make Sonny happier—and Vinnie had to admit, it would make him happier, too. But it wouldn't fix things.

But that was all right, because Vinnie was going to fix them. For one thing, he was going to shop around for a good psychiatrist, somebody he could tell everything to.

And they were going to have real lives; they were going to have—maybe not real friends, but they were going to spend time with other people. Vinnie wasn't going to be crazy anymore, and they weren't going to drive each other crazy anymore. Sonny would still be crazy, but that was all right. Sonny had always been crazy.

"Extra large everything, extra anchovies, be here in forty-five minutes," Sonny said. "And if your mouth gets anywhere near me today, I'm punching you in it." Sonny hated anchovies.

"The only thing my mouth wants to get close to is the pizza," Vinnie assured him. "What're you gonna do with the furniture?"

"Little Sisters of the Poor," Sonny said, smiling at Vinnie as though he'd just been waiting for him to asked. He looked beatific, in a scary sort of way. "Car, too."

 _Trying to buy your way into heaven?_ Vinnie thought, but he didn't want to step on Sonny's good mood. _And who else would think of donating everything to the Little Sisters of the Poor?_ "Donation like that ought'a knock their veils off. Do they still wear veils?"

"Couldn't tell over the phone. Oh, here." Sonny handed him a piece of notebook paper with a couple of phone numbers on it.

"What's this?"

"Numbers of some places that specialize in moving a car from one place to another without driving it."

"You mean, without either of us having to drive it," Vinnie said. "Thanks." But he let the paper flutter to the floor. He could feel Sonny watching him, curious, but not saying anything.

Sonny was wandering around the room, looking at things as though he was shopping for a life. Nothing seemed to interest him very much, but then, there wasn't much there to look at anymore, Vinnie had taken care of that. The seascapes had survived, but not much else from their travels. He was pretty sure that Sonny wasn't going to pack up any of it.

Vinnie wasn't either. Let the Little Sisters of the Poor have it all, compliments of Paul Patrice, by way of Sonny Steelgrave. It was a good joke, but one he'd never be able to tell anyone.

"They could probably get a pretty good sum for my car, too," Vinnie said. It was a weird feeling, planning to leave a place—actually making plans instead of just driving to the interstate and taking whichever road wasn't going in a direction they couldn't go in. 

Sonny turned around, looking at him in surprise. "You're kidding me."

"Hey, in spite'a what you think, it's a great car," Vinnie said, trying not to sound defensive.

Sonny turned away from him, muttering something about all the trouble he'd gone to for "that piece of shit car," but Vinnie didn't say anything. "I thought you loved that car," Sonny said, sounding bewildered.

"I did. I do. I just don't need it anymore."

"Need it for what?" Sonny asked. He came and sat down on the sofa again, looking at Vinnie, really wanting to understand. "'Cause we're gonna be living in the city?"

Vinnie could have let that go, let Sonny believe the easy explanation he'd come up with. "I don't need it to tinker with, to get away from you," Vinnie said easily, and Sonny laughed.

"Yeah, that's one thing it was good for, it kept you busy."

"Yeah, it did. And," he added, "I don't need it to ground myself anymore." He watched Sonny's face, but he couldn't tell if Sonny was getting what he was saying or not. Either way, he was listening very intently. "I don't need it—or anything else—to remind myself who I am."

He expected Sonny to ask "You need reminding of who you are?” in that God-what-are-you-talking-about? tone, but he didn't. "So that's a good thing, right?"

Vinnie smiled. He was feeling so amazingly good. "Yeah, that's a very good thing."


End file.
